Nominally I agreed with most of his points, except this:

> if the NY Times is to be believed, want to be physicians without having to do well in Organic Chemistry, getting their professor essentially fired for being "too hard."

That's a highly reductionist view of the story and doesn't have anything to do with politics, nor the features and characteristics of successive generations of people. Did this generation of students get weaker, or did the 84 year old professor lose his edge as he aged? Perhaps neither, perhaps it's more the incompatibility between teaching/learning methods over such a large generational gap.

I'm not here to settle the argument on why he was fired, just to say that you can't boil it down to such a simplistic reason.